


Happier than before

by Lilliburlero



Category: King Rat - James Clavell
Genre: 1950s, Drowning, F/M, Gen, Homophobic Language, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Period-Typical Sexism, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Racist Language, Sexist Language, Stealth Crossover, Suicide, Transphobia, Unresolved Sexual Tension, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-27 10:50:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2690090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1959. Peter Marlowe has a project, but is short of money; an investor thinks he can help him realise it.</p><p>*</p><p>Content advisory: PTSD, flashbacks, suicide (canonical and uncanonical), references to transphobia and homophobia, numerous references to drowning, period-typical attitudes and language in relation to gender, disability, sexuality and race.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Makioka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Makioka/gifts).



> The title is from W.B. Yeats's poem 'An Irish Airman Foresees his Death', which is also quoted at a couple of points during the story:
> 
> I know that I shall meet my fate  
> Somewhere among the clouds above;  
> Those that I fight I do not hate  
> Those that I guard I do not love;  
> My country is Kiltartan Cross,  
> My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,  
> No likely end could bring them loss  
> Or leave them happier than before.  
> Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,  
> Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,  
> A lonely impulse of delight  
> Drove to this tumult in the clouds;  
> I balanced all, brought all to mind,  
> The years to come seemed waste of breath,  
> A waste of breath the years behind  
> In balance with this life, this death.
> 
> *
> 
> Thanks to [Naraht](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht) for helpful beta advice.

Peter Marlowe, unaccountably graceful despite the tendency of each of his limbs to move in a different direction at once, put his hand on the low lintel and swung into the shabby study-sitting room with a hoot of triumph. The young woman at the desk looked up, raising an eyebrow. 

‘Jessie—I’ve got our timber! Paddy Glennon’s clearing an estate up there, place called Mosstown, and there are some terrific ash trees. He showed me the one he’s going to fell for our mainmast: eighty years old and straight as a plumb line. The north-facing white wood is best, apparently, grows light and strong. And—’ he added, collapsing into the winged chair by the fireplace, ‘he’s giving it to us for nothing.’

She grinned with pleasure. ‘What’d he want to go and do a daft thing like that for?’

‘He either thinks that sailing a leather boat to Newfoundland is a splendidly Irish thing to attempt, or that it’s his patriotic duty to consign as many Brits as possible to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Or both. Couldn’t quite work it out, between the Longford accent and him not having his teeth in.’

‘Bit of luck, anyway.’

‘Rather. Been in short supply, lately.’ Peter’s eyes flickered uncertainly over a small pile of manila envelopes. ‘What about you?’

‘Oh, tawin' on. Robbie sent a postcard to say he's finished with the galleys for the Jason book. Chappie from the wireless rang: they’re not airing the Brendan programme for another three months, which is rather a blow as far as attracting funds to cover a few of these goes,’ she patted the baleful envelopes as if to reassure them, ‘some of which are becoming a wee bit shrill.’

‘Tell me about them when I’ve had a drink. Will you join me?’

‘Certainly will.’

Peter rose and fetched glasses and a jug of water from the kitchen; Jessie retrieved an unopened bottle from the filing cabinet’s alcoholic bottom drawer.  He poured generous fingers of Paddy and offered his cigarettes.

‘And the usual maniacs,’ Jessie resumed, sipping, ‘mostly volunteers whose experience is limited to a merchant seaman grandfather and infant bathtime, but one marriage proposal—no, _you_ , you dolt. She sent an 8 x 10 colour glossy. Oh, and an Eccentric Yank Millionaire on the telephone—or rather, his secretary. She said he was staying in Crosshaven,’  she imitated wonkily, getting the rs all wrong, ‘ _tomorrow through Saturday_ —sounds a bit too good to be true, but all sorts of people do pass through, even in the off-season, so I hung onto it in case—’

She handed Peter a sheet of yellow telephone-message pad. He put aside his drink to take it. 

‘—and the glossy, actually. Not bad,' she remarked, surveying it appraisingly. 'Doesn’t look off her head at all, just goes to show you never— _Pete_.’

Jessie was used to the Old Man’s occasional moments of blank abstraction; it was best to let him come round from them in his own time.  But it was a while since she’d seen him in the grip of the honest-to-God howling terrors. Not since the infestation in the loft. She stood up slowly. He flinched and backed away a step. 

‘Pete. It’s me, it’s Jess, it’s all right. Tell me about the mast timber again, will you? I want to make a couple of notes for Pat—’ She kept her voice even and low.

His eyes and mouth were black slashes in the worn, lined leather of his face. He made a curious creaking sound: not even brutish, more like wood or rope under torsion than anything a living being might produce, then turned and fled the room.  

She found him standing with his back against the gable end of the cottage, gulping the damp soft air. He turned his head towards her, his long body held rigid.

'Fit's adee, Peter?' she asked, concern provoking full-blown Doric. 

‘Just a—dizzy turn.’

‘All right. I’ll stop and cook you dinner if you want company. The night, if you like.’

‘What’ll you tell your Mrs Crayshaw?’

‘The truth, naturally. Omitting some names, and other things.’

‘We’ll have Crosshaven and environs in a lather of gossip.’

‘What, more than they are already are?’

‘Really—? I suppose so, eh?’

‘Actually, the Gael is pure-minded beyond the ways of men. Nine-tenths of them just assume I’m your niece and the rest are _incorrigible_.’

Marlowe laughed unsteadily.

‘Come indoors. You can tell me about it—if you like, or not—’

‘Nothing to tell. The phone message set off—certain associations, that’s all. I think—either I’m quite deranged, or whoever it is— _isn’t_.’

‘You mean it might be genuine?’

He nodded, then shook his head. ‘Not exactly. I don’t know. But I want to find out. Would you ring back and make an appointment for tomorrow? Say lunch?’  He opened his fist and uncrumpled the slip of paper, on which, bordered by Jessie’s friendly-snail doodles, was written the telephone number of the Grand Hotel in Crosshaven and the name _Leroy Henry_.


	2. Chapter 2

Peter Marlowe rang the bell at the reception desk of the Grand Hotel and waited for Mrs Moynihan’s pink, hennaed apex to emerge from the service areas. She shuffled as if she had a sixpence clamped between her knees, the result not of old age, for she was in her mid-forties, but of a spectacular pratfall made, so local legend had it, in the presence of Gregory Peck. Hatless, Peter performed a small Javanese salutation.

‘Afternoon, Mrs Moynihan. I’m looking—’

‘You’re here to see the American gentleman, are you not, Mr Marlowe?’ 

‘Mm. Let him know I’m here, would you please? I’ll wait in the lounge.’

He ordered one of the pint bottles of Guinness puzzlingly known as a ‘meejum’ and stationed himself with a view of both doors into the lounge, which was populated by the usual midweek, midday crowd of middle-class soaks: retired and widowed solicitor, a smattering of strong farmers, a priest from a neighbouring parish, the auctioneer. It was thus not difficult to identify the young woman who entered a few moments later, her dark blonde hair drawn back in a severe chignon, wearing a costume of navy bouclé edged with emerald green. Her slim-heeled shoes, the same green as her gloves, handbag and the trim on her coat, brought her to within half an inch of Marlowe’s six foot. He sensed something shifty enter his eyes and he forced them to meet hers, unexpectedly velvet-dark.

‘Mr Marlowe. My name’s Zerelda Brass. I’m Mr Henry’s personal assistant.’

The accent was queer, Massachusetts, perhaps. Jessie hadn't got it so wrong after all.

‘How do you do?’ 

‘Mr Henry is in his suite, if you’d care to come upstairs.’ 

‘Don’t think so, do you?’ Marlowe waved his hand over his drink. ‘No, actually. Perhaps he’d join me here.’ 

Miss Brass drew a breath, but her lips twitched. He hoped she wouldn’t get an earful.

‘Gee, well. Excuse me, Mr Marlowe. I'll go ask him.’

Peter reflected how entirely his nightwalk, eight miles down the creek and along the coast road after Jessie’s stern solicitude had finally been appeased, had failed to prepare him for what came next. _Solvitur ambulando_ , balls balls balls. He might have slept last night, but he thought the sharper when his nerves were jangly, and in any case, he could live without having to confront whatever this turned out to be fresh out of the sort of dream that was a racing certainty in the circumstances. He smoked a cigarette. The back of his neck prickled with sweat and his guts liquidised. There was still time to bolt. He despised himself for even contemplating it. And then there was no time to bolt.

The King looked like a man. That meant something different now, but it was still astonishingly true. His hair was light brown, his eyes blue; his face open, squarish, clean-shaven; people would say, vaguely, _nice-looking_. His grey flannels were immaculately tailor-made for an off-the-peg body, five foot ten inches tall and somewhere in the middleweight range. He was thirty-nine years old, rich and American. He was the paradigm, the model against which the humanity of every other person on earth was judged, and billions found wanting. Marlowe felt an old hatred—the standard-issue hatred of every man in Changi for the King, doled out with each cup of shark broth and quarter pound of rice—contend paradoxically with an illimitable giddy joy: the King had recovered his face. The King was a man and Peter Marlowe was his friend and it was all going to be all right.   

Peter found he was clutching his left elbow in a manner that could charitably be described as obvious. He stood up, deliberately dropped and extended his hand. His arms and legs were strangely loose and easy. In a moment their hands would touch, he would know if all this were real. He had a dream in which people looked normal but when he got within a foot of them they burst apart into shards of slick, rotten wood, embedding themselves in his flesh. Changi had rendered even his unconscious banal.  

Aware that he had no idea how to address him, Peter understood, with a surge of relief, that it was impossible to call him anything but King. Their palms met and joined, both as clammy as if they’d never left Singapore. 

‘You son of a bitch, Peter Marlowe.’ 

‘King.’ 

‘I got a pretty OK room up there. Quiet. Private. And you make me haul my ass down to this shitty barn.’

‘Not done, men meeting men in hotel rooms. What do you think I am?’ 

‘Same crazy bastard you always were. Sort of crazy bastard who doesn’t know what seawater does to hide.’ 

‘Ah now, you see, you treat it with wool grease and it—’ 

‘Jesus Christ, Peter. Sit the hell down.’ 

He turned to Zerelda, who had come over from the bar. ‘No—that’s it, Zee,’ he said with surprising courtesy. ‘Thanks. Take the car if you want.’ 

‘Wonderful. See you later, Mr Marlowe—don’t get up.’  

Every man in the lounge cringed from her as she passed. Irritated by their timidity, Peter stared brazenly at her retreating figure. The King followed his gaze.

‘So, how do you like my Girl Friday?’ 

Peter knew what he was expected to say, that it would smooth the progress of the conversation with no loss of ground to him, and felt a corresponding stubbornness.

‘I like her. She seems good-humoured.’

‘Dyke.’

‘Oh, really?’ 

‘Suits me fine. She’s company, won’t run off to make babies, won’t try to get me to marry her.There a Mrs Marlowe?’

‘No.’   

Humphrey Moynihan, snuffling through his toothbrush moustache, brought their drinks, another meejum for Peter and whiskey for the King.The King leaned back and put his hand in his pocket; Peter gave him a swift repressive look and made enquiry after the Moynihans'two sons, both living in England. 

‘Huh,’ said the King when Humphrey was out of earshot, ‘I forgot you guys don’t tip.’ 

‘Don’t forget an Irishman isn’t an Englishman and you might just keep your nose intact too. And we do. But it’s complicated.’

‘Complicated,’ he said abstractedly. ‘Yeah.’He offered Peter a cigarette from a scratched silver case and a light from a plain brass Zippo. 

‘Thanks.’

The King’s face shifted to the affable complaisance that signalled the ritualistic prolegomenon to a deal. He reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a pulp paperback, its brittle pages coming unglued from the spine in slatted chunks. He pushed it across the table. The cover illustration depicted a square-jawed blond man in an open shirt standing on the prow of an improbable pastiche of a triaconter.

‘Here, put your John Hancock on that.’

‘My _what_?’  

‘Your autograph.’ 

Marlowe laughed incredulously. ‘God. I didn’t recognise it. It’s called _Sounding Furrows_ on this side of the pond, and the jacket looks a bit—different. But look here. You know—I didn’t write this.’ 

The King’s mouth opened into a small dark cavern of astonishment. 

Peter, mistaking the source of the surprise, added quickly, ‘I mean, it’s not ghost-written in the worst sense. I tried, but I can’t. Even with the logs, I kept on getting muddled and having to go back.My friend Robert—he crewed for me on the Ulysses trip and the Argonauts thing, and he’ll be on this St Brendan one too—writes the books.’ 

‘And you take the credit for it.’

‘Robbie gets the royalties and we plough the advances back into the next project—’ Peter heard his own voice, a thin, self-exculpatory scrannel, and began to laugh. ‘Bloody hell. You’re shocked, aren’t you?’ 

‘No. Didn’t I always say you can hire brains? Just wouldn’t have thought it of _you_ , ‘s all.’ 

‘I didn’t like it at first, actually. But Robbie persuaded me that his wasn’t the name to conjure with—and he has his reasons for not wanting the attention.’

Peter looked down at the scuffed, disintegrating book, suddenly, appallingly aware that his embarrassment had nothing to do with the lurid cover or Robbie’s authorship.The King gathered it out of sight.

‘It _sounds_ just like you,’ he said, a touch of accusation entering his voice again.  

‘Robbie’s quite extraordinary. Double first in Greats—that is, he did as well as you possibly can reading Classics at Oxford. Distinguished himself most unduly—DSO and bar—during the war, and it left him a bit shook, as Humph might say. But, still, he's practically the best sailor I know. You get to know a bloke’s verbal habits quite well after eight months or so on a thirty-foot craft— _too_ well—and he’s a good mimic.’

‘Oh, yeah, I get it,’ the King nodded, clearly drawing a tolerant conclusion. Peter wanted to howl _it’s not like that, not like that at all,_ but that would compound with an obscure treachery the necessity of explaining what it _was_ like. And he wasn’t at all sure he knew.   

'The thing is, I _don't_. What the hell do you mean by all this—am I supposed to believe you just happened to be in the vicinity and thought you’d look up old Marlowe and give him a few grand free, gratis and for nothing?'   

Peter had not raised his voice but knew he had drawn the lounge’s surreptitious attention.The King knew it too. 

‘Kinda. Why not? I haven’t taken a vacation since my wife died, three years ago.’

Peter considered that a pretty cheap manoeuvre. He said, ‘I’m sorry—here they say _sorry for your trouble_ which is rather gracious, I think.’  

‘I like that.’ He mouthed it. ‘Cancer of the pancreas. It took her quick. But painful. I miss her a whole goddamn lot.’He took a snapshot from his pocketbook: a handsome dark woman, a bit matronly, and at least a decade the King’s senior. Peter was mildly surprised: he thought the King’s taste ran to sweet, willowy blondes, and wondered where he’d got that idea. They’d not often talked about women, it was too provoking. He knew the King’d had a girl in the village, but she had been his guerrilla contact, and perforce not a blonde. Then he remembered why, and stifled the line of thought.

‘It’s not at all the same thing—but my mother died of a brain tumour, nearly ten years ago now. Quick decline, you know. Before you’ve had time to take it in that a person’s ill—’

‘We should be used to that, huh?’

Peter felt resentment at the allusion—it was the sort of invitation to confidence that should only be uttered deep in drink—and then impatient at his own reserve.

‘Yes. But one isn’t, somehow. It’s different—I don’t know, women, and peacetime. Look, I say, would you like lunch? The chow here’s comic even by the standards of the genre, but there’s nowhere else.’

‘Zee tried to order us ham sandwiches last night at ten p.m.It was pretty funny.’He imitated her sharp, arhotic Bostonian: _you have bread? you have ham? you have mustard? You have hands? Then you can fix us a sandwich._ That Rita Moynihan, she’s one feisty dame. We went hungry. Officially. Humphrey’s more—easy-going.’ He chuckled appreciatively. ‘Did she really fuck Gregory Peck?’

The strong farmers disdained food in favour of more porter, but the solicitor and the priest were in the dining-room, each at his doleful table for one.The auctioneer had been joined by a woman in tweeds, and a chintzy, twittering female pair made up the complement of diners.

Over the hot water, Bisto and curry powder that the menu called mulligatawny soup, the King said, ‘Tell me about your crazy leather boat.’

Glad of anything which might avert reminiscence or catch-up, Peter told him about St Brendan, called the Navigator, and secular _immrama_ like that of Máel Dúin, and his conviction that St Brendan reached the New World in the sixth century, before Columbus, before the Vikings; about the route: Ireland, the Hebrides, the Faroes, Iceland and South Greenland, sweeping down to the coast of Labrador, Newfoundland, or even further. 

He told him about oak-bark leather  and the tanning stench,  and the extraordinary preservative properties of wool grease, about how you build a curragh upside-down, starting with the double gunwale, and how the sea-going ones had two masts, exactly as they’re drawn in the medieval illuminations. He jawed about leather-working techniques; the monk's satchel he'd inspected in the National Museum of Ireland with invisible stitching that had held tight for more than a thousand years; the apparent impossibility of hiring saddlers and harness-makers (all of whom seemed backed up with extravagant commissions from sheiks until the end of the next decade) to undertake the vast job: two tiers of twenty or more oxhides each, a shell of leather over an inch thick, lashed to the oak and ash frame. 

‘The _Navagatio_ says that St Brendan took a crew of fourteen monks—well, seventeen, actually. At the last minute three reprobates turned up on the hard, asking to come aboard, and he threw a tantrum because it cocked up his sacred numbers. Rum types, saints. It’s absurd, anyway: she wouldn’t float with eighteen people aboard. There’re five of us: me and Robbie; George is our sailing master; Frances, medical officer and photographer; and Jessie's—sort of our youngster, I suppose—graduate student in archaeology.’  

The King listened with the same quiet absorption, punctuated by an occasional perspicacious question, with which he’d attended to Peter’s account of Javanese tobacco-curing or to Vexley talk about—Peter’s well-trained brain swiftly substituted the legend of St Brendan mooring on a whale, a whale with, doubtless, a jolly old John Thomas.

That saw them halfway through the beefsteak pie, which, though neither beefsteak nor a pie, was perfectly adequate, even moderately tasty nourishment. It occurred to Peter that as well as sounding like the most tedious kind of amateur enthusiast, he was deferring the moment at which the King might be prompted to declare his own interest in the venture, thereby disclosing whatever lay in the fourteen years’ hinterland between a fat cigar-chewing sergeant shouting _Get your goddamn ass in the truck_ and this wry, blinking toleration of the cuisine of the British Isles. Peter Marlowe cursed his cowardice, took a deep breath, and described a rough schedule of the costs involved in the expedition.  

‘So—’ the King said, putting down his fork, which he used barbarously right-handed, ‘you still need to raise about—’ 

Peter named a figure.

‘Yeah, I can do you for that. Sure that’s all you need?’

Peter struggled to keep his face neutral. He was thinking of other numbers. In Malay, with its cumbrous count classifiers. _Three hundred microfarads_. _Thirty thousand, five in Straits dollars at the rate of eight to one_. N’ai laughing at him because he’d used the number-word for _people_ when talking about chickens or coconuts— _no, Marlowe_ , _stop it_. ‘Yes. There's fifteen percent contingency worked in. But look—why? There's nothing in this for you.'  

'Your monk had fourteen guys, right, and then the three sinners showed up, and he was mad about it because—' 

'It screwed up his numerology—oh no. No. No. Not a chance. Have you even been _listening_ to me? I'm sailing a bloody open cockleshell made of leather, ash-wood and sheep-sweat across the sodding Atlantic. Have you any idea what it's going to be like even if she's not ripped to bits in the first blow? She's got no keel—a capsize is just about the likeliest thing you can imagine—all it would take would be one big wave and she’ll overturn and drown the lot of us. Look—George is sixty, tough as nails, went to sea as a boy before the First War and was in corvettes in the last lot; he’s the only reason on earth I don’t say Robbie’s the best sailor I know and _he's_ shitting bricks over this one. We have to be—’ he nearly said _a unit._ ‘—completely confident of each other. I don't take dead weight and I don’t take fucking— _trippers_ , not at any price.'

The dining room was openly gawping. The waiter, halfway across the room to clear away their plates, made an abrupt detour to enquire after the priest’s sole.

'Jeez, Pete. Keep your wig on. Joke. I get sick on the Staten Island Ferry on a hot still day in July.' 

Peter sank back, laughing weakly. ‘Sorry, chum. Bloke can lose his sense of humour after the umpteenth clueless twit who’s never seen more salt water than it takes to boil a spud volunteers his services. But seriously—what _is_ in it for you?’

‘Nothing. That’s what I like about it. I’m no Rockefeller—I can’t endow some goddamn college, but I wanted to do something—useless.’

Peter raised an eyebrow. 

‘You know. _Because it’s there_ , like that Limey bastard said.’ 

‘I think a Yank sub-editor said it for him, actually.’ 

‘You serious? I always thought that was the most English thing I ever heard. It—’ he hesitated and then went on boldly, ‘reminds me of you. The danger-excitement.’ 

‘A lonely impulse of delight/Drove to this tumult in the clouds — ’

‘What?’ 

‘Oh—one Irishman wrote that about another, a fighter pilot—about to buy the farm. The English don’t have a monopoly,’ Peter offered generously. ‘But—as long as you know the score. It’s—’

‘Burying money?’ 

Refusing to be rattled, Peter said with a grin, ‘Drowning it.’

‘You know, I married my money—yeah, turns out it ain’t so easy to start from zero, even in the land of the free. But once you _got_ some money, you can introduce it to other money and it breeds pretty fast—breeds like—'  

Black blotches stained Peter's vision and his ears filled as if with water—he thought of tonight, of the inevitability of sleep and dreams. Physically, he could support another night without sleep—but there was no point, after two straight nights without they came anyway, peripheral and skittering. He loathed this weakness in himself, wanted to excise it, cut the rot away. The waiter was a step away over the King's shoulder. Perhaps he would get there before the King said, 

'—goddamn jackrabbits.' The waiter, looking affronted, removed his plate.

Over gritty tinned pears in custard also gritty with undissolved powder, the King told his story. 

‘Well, a couple of reports either didn’t get written or didn’t reach the guy they were supposed to reach. I was expecting—something to come at me the whole time: arrest, the old blue ticket, but— _nada_. I guess I didn’t seem as different from the others as those folks back there thought.’

Peter remembered him by the truck, standing apart from Brough and Dino and Tex and Byron Jones: they were emaciated and haggard, but he was _diminished_. The King’s loss of face might just have been the saving of him.

‘I wasn’t gonna push it. I got myself as far from any government program as I could. Took a salesman job: vacuum cleaner spare parts. Turns out I’m a pretty good salesman.’

‘Oh. That won’t do, will it?’

The King smiled and shook his head. ‘Sales is the opposite of doing business. Or that’s what it feels like. If you’re making money for yourself, there’s a point when things start taking care of themselves—doesn’t mean you can stop watching them, but they got—momentum. Selling some other guy’s shit, you gotta bust your ass just a little more every day. About a year of that and it occurred to me I was a bum just like my pa. Only wearing a a necktie and a snap-brim hat.’

‘Worse, somehow.’

‘Right. So I said to myself, next place I wash up in that I think I can stay stay awhile, I will. That place was Lexington, Kentucky. Nice town. Kinda hick, but you can get too much of the bright lights. Saw an ad for a position as a payroll clerk with a firm I’d never heard of. Well, I’ve done payroll without no desk and no files and no ledgers, I thought: I could sit on my ass doing that all day and still have the energy to build myself a little business by nights. It wasn’t a firm, exactly—more a conglomeration of interests: guy from an old mine-owning family’d married a tobacco and stud-farm heiress, then he’d died, leaving her everything. No kids. She was twenty years younger’n him and reckoned his people were all kiss-ass time-servers. Fired the lot of ‘em—got in some new blood. Soon started doing more interesting things than payroll—only thing I didn’t like about it was making dough for someone else and getting a paycheck myself. So, to cut a long story short—’

‘Reader, you married her?’

‘Yeah—you read that one too? Kinda dumb, I thought. Still, I checked out the attic before I committed myself. Caused one hell of a stir. Kentucky high society’s kinda got a stick up its ass, and it’d collectively decided I was a gigolo. Pretty funny, really. All these dried-up old fucks who’d had counties named after their great-grandaddies wanting her to marry their bank vaults, and I was the gold-digger for being eleven years younger than her and making her laugh. You wondering about the name, yeah? It’s my legal name. Lillian loved her daddy—adored him. He died when she was a little girl. And when her first husband died she’d gone back to it, sort of unofficially. So I said OK, I'd change mine. I’d heard plenty of the old one for a single lifetime.’

‘I thought it was a—joke. Henry V, you know—in disguise? Shakespeare?’

The King shook his head. ‘Never was much on Shakespeare. Except _Othello_. Dammit, I love that play. The way all those white folks can’t bear to see a Negro have it all: the power, the fame, the girl, and they just have to run him down. And he’s still bigger than any of them at the end, except _her_. Orson Welles was OK, in the movie. But a white man can’t really play him. Always wanted to see Paul Robeson, but the run on Broadway ended before I got back home, and I got over here just too late this year. He’s a goddamn Red though,’ he said, suddenly narrow-eyed and reproving. ‘Actors should stick to what they’re good at.’

Peter twitched. A blue-and-silver flicker started at the corner of his eye. ‘I don’t go to the theatre myself—or the pictures. I don’t loathe it or anything; it’s just that however good the actors are, I can’t seem to forget it's make-believe, and that’s rather frightfully fatal to the whole business.’

‘Anyway,’ the King continued, ‘then everyone thought I was a pussy-whipped gold-digger.’ He laughed, foxy and strident. ‘Can be pretty useful, people thinking you got weaknesses you ain’t got. Lillian and me were—buddies. She was smart, classy. Way I see it, all those boy-meets-girl maneuvers—they’re just another way of having the screws on somebody. You can’t do that to a friend.’ His face was taut and bleak with grief.

Peter reached for his cigarettes and offered one, keeping his eyes carefully averted.

‘Thanks. You want a cognac?’ asked the King.

‘For the value of _cognac_ that’s Humph’s smuggled Spanish gutrot, all right. Mutton and mint sauce.’

‘What?’

‘What you might as well be hanged for. I’ll show you over the boatyard afterwards, if you like. It’s just three hundred yards along the road. There’s nothing going on; we’re waiting for a consignment of wood. But you can meet Pat and Murph and the lads—’

*

Pat Lake greeted them from the entrance of a corrugated-iron hut, unlit cigarette and chipped teacup in hand. Peter told him about the mast timber. ‘I’m ahead of you there, Peter. I was after meeting with Jessica in town this morning and she telt me all about it. I wouldn’t be so cheerful about trusting my life to the grease of a yow’s backside as she seems to be. You’re ruining that girl for a husband, so you are.’

Peter tutted, unembarrassed. ‘Slander, Pat. Of me and Jessie's Not Impossible He alike. Pat Lake—Mr—Mr Henry. Potential investor.’

‘Crapdoodle on potential. I’m in like Flynn. Good to meet you, Mr Lake. Peter tells me you’re the best shipwright in Crosshaven—’ a minim rest, a smile of dizzying frankness, ‘—which he says means in the world.’

Pat looked at his shoes. ‘I'm not bad, I suppose,’ he muttered, then jerked his head up, startled by the spectacle of two men in middle life shrieking with adolescent laughter. ‘G’wan with the two of you gossoons. Mr Henry, what is it you’d like to see?’

‘I’ll leave that up to you. You’re the expert.’

‘Right you are. You’re staying at the Grand, are you not? That young one Olive English who does out the rooms says you’re a movie mogul.’

‘Uh-uh. Coal, tobacco and a scrap of horseflesh, Mr Lake.’

‘Ah. Fair play. Come down here and you can see what I’ve on the go—but Peter can show you his shed full of stinking leather for himself, now—fair turns the bag over, so it does—’

As they left the boatyard, the King asked, with the abrupt manner he used, usually successfully, to elicit confidences, ‘Who’s Jessica?’

‘I told you. The archaeologist. Your Miss Brass spoke to her yesterday. She helps me with paperwork one day a week and next year she's taking a sort of sabbatical to crew—’

‘You’re taking a girl?’

‘I prefer mixed company, don’t you? Had a bit of a sickener of the other during the war.’

‘Christ, Peter.’

‘She’s a bloody good sailor, cool head in a crisis. From a line of Aberdonian seamen going back to the Ark, but her father moved the family to Durban when she was fourteen, so she's sailed some interesting waters.’

‘But—’

‘Oh, you mean her _virtue_. I don’t think sailing a giant leather canoe to Newfoundland leaves a lot of time for the sex-urge, really. Might have to watch her with the young Vikings in Iceland. But in any case, Robbie isn’t interested in women, George prefers boats, and Frances is my wife—’

‘You said—’

‘You asked if there was a Mrs Marlowe, and there isn’t; she didn’t take my name, for professional reasons. She’s a photographer; her work takes her away a lot—Cuba, at the moment. I’ve known her quite a long time, but we only married this year. Frances Adrian.’

‘Hell, yeah. Seen her stuff in _Life_. Beautiful.’

‘Yes, she is, rather.’ Peter feinted a grasp at the empty air beside the King’s left arm just in time to see him make the same gesture at his right.

‘Come on,’ Peter said, ‘Let’s take a spin down to the cottage.’

The afternoon light was of the curiously palpable, sepia-tinted kind peculiar to Irish autumns, the western sky pinkening into sunset. They drove along narrow roads bordered by hazardous ditches and dreeping hedges, Peter frowningly aware that the sea breeze had misled him into the belief that the brandy’s effects had worn off. Not to mention the claret and the Guinness. The King broke the silence that had obtained since they left Crosshaven.

‘You know, Pat back there had a point. You ever think about the movies?’

‘What?’

‘A movie. About your expedition.’

‘Don’t think sixth-century abbots make very good stars of the silver screen, somehow.’

‘I didn’t mean your crazy monk. I meant you.’

Peter felt something icy crawl sluggishly from his nape to the base of his spine. _Those were pearls that were his eyes, he thought_.

‘God no. Anyway, they only make flicks about the ones who don’t make it back. Scott. Mallory—has there been a film about Mallory? I mean to make it back.’

‘I’m just saying I know some people. I think they could get a studio interested. It’s a risk—but if it worked out, it’d earn you drop-dead dough. You could do what you liked for the rest—’

‘No! Fucking hell, _no_. It’s not what I do it for, all right? It's the absolute opposite of what I do it for, in fact. I won’t have some barnstormer frisking about, pulling faces—pretending to be someone he's not—look, it’s just not what I do it for.’

‘OK.’ The King let some time go by. ‘What do you do it for?’ he asked softly. ‘I knew an airman. Why the sailing?’

The sea roared in Peter’s ears and blood bloomed before his eyes. He thought for a second he might have to pull over, but mastered it. He’d told Frances most of this nonsense; she sometimes shared his need to dodge sleep and her work had made her well-nigh unshockable. But she, as a nurse, had _tended_ , and as a photographer, _observed_. She hadn’t been the subject of attention. The King hadn’t been a subject either, not properly, but he was the closest he was likely to get, since Mac—Peter tried to push away the thought of Mac’s last letter, a decade and more ago.

He said crisply, ‘Well, actually, a lot of it’s not that different: just operating in another element. But I suppose—immemorial tradition of the Service and all that. You know my father died at sea—Murmansk run, in ’43?’

‘I didn’t. Sorry to hear it. More to it than that, though, yeah?’

Peter nodded. He wasn’t sure that if he opened his mouth he wouldn’t be sick. He had a ghastly apprehension of tiny figures in a brightly-lit room, acting. He knew one of them was him.

‘It’s got something to do with Sean, right? Why you blew your stack when I mentioned the movies?’

Peter suddenly found he could speak clearly and freely, no encumbering lump in his throat. It helped that he could keep his eyes fixed on the road.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I never quite told you the truth about that. We had been lovers, of course. You saw it straight away.’

‘Takes a lot to trust in the obvious sometimes. When you denied it I was inclined to believe you, because it would’ve been the obvious thing not to. But yeah. I saw it.’

‘That imbecile, Rodrick. Frank Parrish wasn’t as bad, but Rodrick, Christ. Thinking his tinpot little shows— _turned_ Sean. The conceit of it. I could have dashed his brains out, if there'd been any to dash. Sean told me, or as good as, long before that—I’m sorry, I’m not being awfully coherent.’

‘No, I get it. When you were in Java, before the Japs—’

‘Yes. The first time I took—we—went to bed. Sean tried to tell me then. I lost the rag, naturally.’

‘Naturally.’

Peter fought an expression of dislike with the thought of Robbie’s invariable witticism, now too venerable to resent, though at first outing, Robbie being willing to wound and _not_ afraid to strike when his blood was up, it had been matter almost for murder: _the skipper out-Marlowes Marlowe. I pray you avoid it._

‘Should have been reassured, shouldn’t I?’ Peter giggled stupidly. ‘I’d never been with a man before—or since, if that matters. And if Sean wasn’t a man, it meant—’

‘You weren’t queer?’

‘But it didn’t work like that, as it happens. It was a man I desired, so that's what Sean had to be. I didn't want the woman, and I dismissed her, told her she didn’t exist. No, worse, that she had to go on impersonating a man, for my sexual gratification. The unspeakable temerity of me.'

'Cut yourself some slack. We were all goddamn jerk-offs at twenty-one.'

'Sean wasn't.'

'Sean was different.’

'Anyway, my line was _you’re not a girl, just afraid of being a queer_. Talked a lot of bloody rubbish about virility and ancient Greece, as I recall—do you know what I mean?’

‘They don’t call Lexington the Athens of the West for nothing.’

Peter risked a glance to his left and saw blue mischief. ‘God, do they?’

‘Uh-huh. Sure do. And no, it ain’t even that much fun. Unless you’re a horse, maybe.’

‘Sean believed me, I think, or tried to—and what there’d been between us, what I’d said—made it rather worse later on, more of a struggle. And then, when we met again in Changi—I told you what I did then. To someone who’d been through what Sean had—’ Peter’s throat closed again; he changed gear with unnecessary vehemence.

‘Makes more sense knowing what I know now—how mad you were about it all. Jeez. Sometimes when I think back—I can’t believe the things we did. Not the deals. That was just business, same as anywhere, but with a few more hazards, or different ones. But things like Sean up there in that little room. We were like some crazy caveman tribe with their goddess. You shouldn’t beat yourself up. That was just a fucked-up situation—nothing anyone could have done to fix it.’

‘Not _fix_. But I might have been brave enough to offer friendship. Or, to use a good old English word, _love_. There was no-one as courageous as Sean—physically or morally. I could have at least tried to match it.’ Peter yawned elaborately to give himself a reason to wipe his hand across his eyes.

‘You did. In the end.’

‘Too late.’

This was undeniable, and the King had the instinctive social grace not to attempt a reassurance that could only be hollow. He rolled down the passenger window and lit cigarettes for them both.

‘What happened to Sean?’

‘Drowned. We were there for weeks after they shipped you out, you know. They let us go down to the beach. Sean went one day and didn’t come back. We found a pair of shorts and a shirt in a cove up the beach from the main bathing-place. The stockings and brassiere, embroidered sarong and baju—all the women’s gubbins—were missing. Never found a body, but it was pretty clear what she did.’ _The years to come seemed waste of breath_ —

‘Yeah. I guess. Christ.’

‘I daresay,’ Peter said, artificially hard and bright, ‘some crass trick cyclist would say that my death drive wants to join—both of them—on the seabed, or something. But I’ve had more close shaves than I care to say and all I can remember is the determination to survive.’

‘We all do what we have to to survive. Even the ones who don’t.’

‘Which is all of us, if you only think about it for a minute. It’s just a matter of living with yourself in the meantime.’

*

‘Cup of Joe?’ Peter offered.

‘Serious? The stuff they call coffee over here—’

‘Chicory bilge-water, I know. I get mine from Fortnum & Mason. Practically my only indulgence in an otherwise semi-monastic existence, as you see.’ He waved a hand around the miscellaneous study-sitting-room.

‘Little grocery store back home, huh? Man, I didn’t figure that out for ‘bout ten years, and I still curse your hooty ass whenever I think of it. Can I make a phone call?’

‘On the desk. Book’s under it.’

‘Where in hell is this place, anyway? I want to leave a message at the hotel for Zee. Ask her to give me a ride later on.’ 

‘Ringabella. And oh—don’t say _ride_. The, um, local idiom’s _lift_.’

‘Ringa—what?’

‘Ringabella. That’s it, that’s the address: Peter Marlowe, Ringabella, Co.Cork, Ireland. Send me a picture postcard sometime. The hotel’ll give her directions. There are only three houses in the townland, and mine’s the one with the rustbucket Austin parked outside.’

‘Ringa-fucking-bella. Jeez, this country—’ 

Peter made coffee and dosed it with Paddy. He lit the fire—Christ, if someone had told him forty-eight hours ago that the King would be sitting on his sofa—his hands shook slightly as he piled sods of turf on the blazing kindling. They fell to spasmodic reminiscence of people and places of whom and which Peter thought he would never speak again to someone who had known them: he found it neither comforting nor as daunting and painful as he might have expected. As the shadows became evening, the whiskified coffee became whiskey and water.

‘—Grey—Grey made the papers, poor swine. His wife was a gruesome little tart of a film-actress: I can’t remember her stage-name, but her real one was Gertrude—something. They always seem to be Gertrude something. She re-married—her agent, and it wasn’t quite legit. somehow. Grey—as you might expect—made a fuss, and the yellower sections of the press leapt on the court case. I was flying for BOAC at the time, and some of the fellows took the _Mirror_ , for the _Jane_ strip, you know—no, I suppose you don’t. The funnies, anyway. I couldn’t bear to read about it. Ill-bred brute, but even I wouldn’t have wished that sort of humiliation on him. His Christian name’s Robin; doesn’t fit, does it—’

‘—almost as soon as we got back home—some of those guys outranked me quite a bit, so—nah. The people I think about are the ones the other side of the wire—Sutra, Kasseh, Cheng San—what the fuck happened to them?’

‘—Mac—found his wife in a Displaced Persons camp—she’d been—oh Christ—a Jap colonel took her as his—mistress—and she’d had a child by him—at first she said the girl was an orphan but then—it all came out and you know Mac—he said we—’

‘—all did what we had to t’survive—’

‘—but Mem couldn’t handle it—she locked the kids in their room, sealed the kitchen windows and doors with wet towels and turned the gas on—in his last letter he wrote— _I forgave her for the wrong that had been done to her, may I never be forgiven_—he said his little boy had forgotten any English he had, despised Mac for only being able to speak to him in Malay, servants’ language—’

‘—why you didn’t drop that piece-of-shit radio down a borehole when we all knew the war was done anyway—goddammit, Pete, I thought I was gonna lose you and all for nothing—’

‘—her name was N’ai—I couldn’t even tell Fran about her—whenever I tried to get it straight in my head it sounded like the coarsest sort of fantasy—a white man frigging himself on the East—’

‘—thirty thousand dollars that might as well have been on a goddamn Monopoly board—’

Peter saw it coming, as one always sees the expected for which one has failed to prepare: approaching inexorably, sedately, and much, much too quickly to do anything about it.

‘—and hell— _rusa tikus_ haunches—you _genius_ —’

‘Don’t—’ It came out self-deprecatingly, all wrong.

‘The officers—chowing them down like—oh my God—the smell of cooking all over the camp—and it was r—’

Peter’s temples pounded and the walls of the room wagged. He heard a remote voice rather like his mother’s say,  _Would you like another drink?_

And then he was through it, it was all right. The King was holding out his glass. Peter poured generously into it, then re-corked the bottle, placing it slowly and deliberately at the foot of the armchair. The King settled back onto the sofa.

‘But, seriously, don’t you ever wonder what happened to the Farm—we just abandoned those fucking animals—Adam and Eve and what the fuck—Big Beulah and Junt—’

It was a red and it was a monsoon and it was a struggling towards the fence with the pain that was just a flesh wound in his arm that was throbbing and jagging with a hook could be quite a good idea in about seventeen ninety-eight and his legs had somehow got crossed like wires as spindly as the cat’s whisker on a crystal set ‘ _mahlu_ on the legs and it was almost on him a swarming and pink and grey translucent slime with teeth in it and a gangrenous reek and it was a going down under the jelly and a drowning and a tearing and _of his bones are coral made_ —

He came to with the taste of iron and bile in his mouth and a linoleum desert before his eyes. A pair of grey flannel knees became a face, blurred with concern. He tried to sit up and things span.

‘Whoa—take it easy.’ Hands caught him under his arms. ‘Can you make it to the couch?’

Yes, yes, he could. He did. The King had his face back and he was a man and Peter Marlowe was his friend and it was all going to be all right. The King sank beside him on the sofa, head in hands, rubbing his temples.

‘I’m frightfully sorry—had a bit of a dizzy turn,’ Peter ventured. The King looked up and around, incredulous.

‘The hell you did. You went for my throat—sorry, man. Reflex action.’

The King touched his own upper lip. ‘Then you staggered towards the door and fell.’

Peter took his handkerchief from his pocket, dabbed at his lip and winced. ‘Rather—shy-making—’

‘Don’t worry about it. If I’d known—if you’d said something, you dumb crap—’

‘What could one possibly say? It’s ridiculous, pitiful.’

The coffee table was on its side: the earthenware mugs and crystal tumblers had all, thanks to one of the odd miracles that pertain to breakables, survived their fall: there was a dark patch of spilt whisky on the rag hearth-rug. The metal ashtray had upended a little slag heap just beside it, with oddly landscaped effect. Peter glared at the mess as if it were the cause rather than the result of catastrophe and dropped the handkerchief.

‘You could say  _don’t mention the rats_.’

Peter began to shake—he didn’t himself know with what at first, but seeing alarm cross the King’s face, knew it to be laughter: convulsive, wheezing, penetrating laughter. The King, susceptible as he always was, displayed symptoms immediately.

‘Don’t—’

‘men—tion—’

‘—the—r—r’

‘r—a—a—a—ats—’

Peter clutched the King’s forearms and they floundered together until some fresh spasm caused Peter to relax his grip. The King rocked forward, his hands sliding awkwardly inside Peter’s jacket in a gesture that could only be described as a caress, kneading the small of his back, his head coming to rest on Peter’s shoulder. Peter drew himself up preparatory to breaking an embrace that had become disquietingly intimate; the King raised his head, and for a fraction of a moment their lips brushed. Peter felt no desire, nor even affection: the kiss was hieratic, symbolic, chivalrous. It was monarch and vassal: all that really surprised him was that he had unquestionably received and not given it. He had read somewhere that medieval Irish kings bared their breasts for their client lords to kiss their nipples in demonstration of fealty— _fucking Christ, Marlowe, stop it_. There was a smudge of his blood between the King’s nose and lip.

‘Come here—’ Peter licked his thumb and drew it across the smear, cradling the King’s jaw.

‘Thanks. I think.’

They looked at each other, not understanding, but understanding. Light showed around the cracks in the curtain and an engine growled to a halt. Peter knew his expression was the mirror of the King’s, and it read _cops_. The King scrambled to right the table and Peter dashed for the front door, realising only as the knock sounded that his lip was still bleeding and his handkerchief was in the living room. He wiped it on his sleeve.

‘Good evening, Miss Brass—do come in.’

‘Hello there.’

Her firmly unenquiring smile indicated that he probably had blood streaked across his face as well as on his cuff. The King had done somewhat better, having restored table, glasses, ashtray and mugs and arranged himself in a careful attitude of insouciance on the sofa.

‘Would you like a drink?’ Peter asked.

‘No thank you—I never take anything when I drive, Mr Marlowe.’

‘Coffee?’

She glanced over his shoulder at the King.

‘No—I think we should hit the road, Zee.’

The King stood up and shook Peter’s hand. ‘Thanks for the drink—I’ll be in touch about the details. Some simple paperwork, and the dough’s yours.’

‘Yes.’ Peter swallowed hard. 'Thank you. Not a bad day, on the whole.’

‘No. Not bad.’

Peter watched, leaning on the doorjamb, as the King got into the car. Abjectly, he stepped forward, half-raised his hand in a wave goodbye. But the King did not look back. When the tail-lights had disappeared into the night Peter shut the door. His cut lip stung: he’d have a bruise to explain tomorrow. Only then did it occur to him that he was back on the payroll, and though he wasn’t sure he liked it one bit, he knew it was where he belonged. He was tired, but no longer afraid to sleep. _A waste of breath the years behind_ , he murmured, not really knowing what he meant by it, _In balance with this life, this death._

**Author's Note:**

> Peter Marlowe's expedition is unashamedly based, detail-for-detail, on Tim Severin's [Brendan Voyage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Severin#The_Brendan_Voyage_.281976.E2.80.931977.29).
> 
> This is a book-canon fic, but Peter Marlowe's wind-up about Fortnum & Mason appears only in the 1965 film. I found it irresistible, though.
> 
> This story is compatible with my [Consistently Homesick](http://archiveofourown.org/series/96068) series, though it's only very tangentially related to it.


End file.
